Newsletters

LizardTales Newsletter – August 2005

From The CEO

Carlos Domingo CEO

Dear Customers and Partners,

As we complete our first quarter following the merger of LizardTech, Extensis and Celartem U. S., I am happy to report that we have made huge strides toward honing our focus on digital content management and distribution to position the company to best serve new and existing markets, while creating a more efficient and focused operation toward profitability for our shareholders.

As part of this strategy, this quarter, Celartem Inc. completed the sale of its popular creative professional tools from Extensis and LizardTech including Photoshop® Plug-in, Genuine Fractals to independent software developer, onOne Software. onOne Software is committed to continue serving the loyal customer base of professional photographers and creative professionals that Genuine Fractals has developed over the years. The sale of Genuine Fractals to onOne Software will enable us focus on our growth strategy for digital content management and distribution.

On the geospatial side, LizardTech was one of the sponsors of this year’s “GML and Geo-Spatial Web Services Conference” in Vancouver, BC. At the conference, two of our senior engineers, in conjunction with our partners from Galdos, presented a paper and a workshop on the new GMLJP2 standard from OGC. LizardTech has been leading together with Galdos the standardization process for GMLJP to “spatially enable” JPEG 2000 files, by adding GML to the .jp2 file which can represent the coordinate reference system of the image, provide annotations, define how multiple images within a file should be mosaicked together, and more. GML and JPEG 2000 — both ISO standards — are a great example of how the geospatial industry can leverage and combine standards to take advantage of new technologies and an even greater example of how LizardTech is contributing to development of interoperability standards in the industry.

Another notable milestone last quarter was LizardTech’s Document Express with DjVu becoming instrumental in enabling the Washington State Digital Archives to make public records available via the Internet in LizardTech’s open DjVu® document image format. The Washington State Digital Archives is the nation’s first archives dedicated specifically to the preservation of electronic records – from both state and local agencies – that have permanent legal, fiscal or historical value, including maps and other documents that were scanned from their original paper form. So now you can enjoy a high quality version of historical documents like the Washington Constitution delivered in your desktop instantly thanks to LizardTech’s DjVu technology. For more details take a look at our case study here or just enjoy the “Top Five Treasures” of the digital archive in DjVu here.

Best regards,

 

Carlos Domingo Signature

Carlos Domingo
President and CEO
Celartem Inc.


GeoExpress 5.0 with MrSID®

GeoExpress

SANZ, manufacturer of EarthWhere™, software for the provisioning and output of geospatial imagery, has incorporated MrSID technology into EarthWhere version 4.0. Now, EarthWhere customers can read and write to MrSID®, further maximizing their geospatial datasets while having one tool for the provisioning and output of imagery.

Meanwhile, GeoExpress 5.0 with MrSID has been in the limelight recently as key industry press take note:

  • Earth Imaging Journal, “Spain’s Cartographic Institute of Catalonia Now Delivers Digital Imagery Online” July/August issue
  • GeoConnexion, “Wavelet Space: the New GIS Workshop” May/June issue
  • Earth Imaging Journal, “GeoExpress 5.0 Extends the Utility of MrSID Generation 3 and JPEG 2000 Images” May/June issue
  • GeoWorld Magazine, reviews of “Express Server,” “GeoExpress” and “Oracle GeoRaster and LizardTech Technology.” May issue

LizardTech is now offering a powerful toolset especially for working with .SID imagery. This low cost toolset is called GeoExpress Tools. GeoExpress Tools has all the capabilities of the regular GeoExpress product, with the exception of raw image compression.

With GeoExpress Tools you can take existing .SID files, CCMs, and optimize them for your specific needs. This includes:

  • Further compression
  • Area of interest compression
  • Single tile mosaic updates
  • Coordinate reprojection
  • Image cropping
  • Mosaic MrSID tiles

All this capability in one easy to use software package. Contact your LizardTech sales representative to learn how you can get GeoExpress Tools.

LizardTech welcomes four new resellers for GeoExpress:

  1. PAR Government Systems – Rome, NY
  2. U.S. Aerial Photography – Portsmouth, NH
  3. Pangaea Information Technologies – Chicago, IL
  4. Lynx Information Systems – Houston, TX

We invite end-users of GeoExpress or MrSID imagery to work with these resellers for all of their .SID or JPEG200 imagery needs.

 


Express Server 5.2

Express Server

Whether you need to share images and electronic documents with employees inside your local organization or distribute them to customers around the world, learn how other companies are using Express Server for fast, efficient delivery while preserving the visual quality of original images.

Looking for a way to quickly and efficiently distribute large geospatial images to U. S. Embassies worldwide in a JPEG 2000 format, the U. S. Department of State selected LizardTech’s Express Server as the solution to deliver images quickly. The State department has been a long time MrSID customer and wanted to adopt the JPEG2000 format moving forward. They were excited to learn that GeoExpress 5.0 also encodes geospatial imagery to the JPEG 2000 format and, when combined with Express Server, they are able to stream JPEG 2000 images quickly no matter the connection speed.

Seeking a solution to make their image archives available to their customer base, the Army National Guard chose Express Server. After testing multiple products, The Army National Guard selected GeoExpress 5.0 with MrSID for compressing geospatial imagery and Express Server for quickly distributing those images. No other product matched Express Server in speed for delivering large file sized images.


Document Express 5.1 with DjVu®

Document Express

Coming soon a better way to use your DjVu files!

In late August, look for the release of the new version of Professional Editor and the FREE DjVu Plug-in. The new version of Professional Editor will allow you to add annotations like text box, notes, indicator lines, multiple color highlights more efficient hyper links. The new FREE plug-in for viewing DjVu documents enables you to view double-page spreads such as magazines and newspapers quickly and easily. An enhanced Graphical User Interface means navigating through DjVu documents is easy and intuitive.

Download the FREE DjVu browser plug-in for viewing DjVu documents.


Genuine Fractals

LizardTech recently announced the sale of its popular Photoshop Plug-in, Genuine Fractals, to independent software developer, onOne Software.

Read the press release to find out more.


Where is LizardTech?

Upcoming events in Americas:

14th Annual GIS for Oil & Gas Conference and Exhibition
September 19-21, 2005 - Houston, Texas

GIS in the Rockies
September 21-23, 2005 - Denver, Colorado

XII – Conferencia Latino Americana ESRI LEICA GIS
September 21-23, 2005 - Brazil

SWUG 2005 Conference
September 24-28, 2005 - Park City Marriott, Utah

MAUG 2005 – Midwest ArcGIS Users Conference
October 5-7, 2005 - Bloomington, IN

21st Annual New York State GIS Conference
October 17-18, 2005 - Rochester

16th William T. Pecora Memorial Symposium
October 23-27, 2005 - Sioux Falls, South Dakota

GEOINT Symposium 2005
October 30-November 2, 2005 - San Antonio, TX

2005 ESRI Wisconsin User Group Conference
November 10 – 11 - Green Bay, WI at the Best Western Midway Hotel

Upcoming events in Europe:

20th European Conference for ESRI Users
October 26-28, 2005 - Warsaw, Poland

Complete schedule of LizardTech events